Hurricake Pops

As many of you know there was a little thing called Hurricane Sandy earlier this week.  First of all, fortunately I'm fine.  The power didn't go out, it seems there was minimal damage to structures in my area and overall the effect has only been in public transportation.  Basically at the moment traveling anytime is like traveling at rush hour and traveling at rush hour is MADNESS.

So what does one do when one has the day off from work in preparation of a hurricane?  One makes Hurricake Pops of course! I had bought this kit at Target because I thought it looked fun for Halloween themed cake pops that looked like eyeballs.  I've never made cake pops before but since they always looked so complicated I thought having a kit that had all the ingredients and told me what to do would be the way to start.  Basically cake pops take a long time to make because there are a lot of different steps.

First off is to bake the cake part.  In this case it was red velvet cake.  After baking the cake as normal you put it in the fridge for about 15min or so to let it cool.  Meanwhile you mix together a small amount of frosting.  After the cake is cool, you cut it into cubes and crumble the cake into a mixing bowl with the frosting and mix it together until it is a consistency where you can shape it.

Cake/frosting mixture

After you have the cake mixed, you use it to form little balls that then get popped into the freezer for about 20min to harden.

Cake balls

 After the cake has hardened, you melt these things called melting wafers and after inserting sticks, coat the cake in the melting wafer frosting and then stick them upright so they can dry.

Drying cake pops

After the cake pops have dried, you can decorate them with regular frosting!  Since these were Halloween cake pops they were all supposed to look like eyeballs, but that got boring so I ended up making several different designs just for fun.

Finished cake pops!

The pop on the left Monica calls my "Lambchop Cakepop"

I brought in some of the leftovers to work on Thursday (when I could finally get into the office) and they were a big hit!

Another random story:  I had heard that if you think your power is going to go out you should freeze gallon size ziplock bags of water.  That way if the power goes out you have extra water to drink, but also the giant ice blocks help keep your food colder for a longer time.  My roommates and I decided to do this just to be on the safe side and after the hurricane mess was mostly over we took one out and defrosted it in the sink.  It was so funny because it looked just like a pillow!  Well until we had to run the water and the water melted a hole in the middle.  Then it was a donut pillow.

Donut Ice Pillow

And then finally, I alluded to this earlier, but this is a picture I took at the subway station when I was on my way home from work on Thursday:

Luckily I'm smart and realized that if I walked up and around to a different set of staircases at the other end of the platform there were far less people.